CONTINUED
The couple is surprisingly still throughout the exchange, despite the dynamic energy of the conversation. The young couple stood within the boundaries of a single sidewalk block, within a stone’s throw of a stop sign. Vast expanses of grass in every direction left the three towers center-stage under the beating tropical sun.

By this time, Andrew has the disposition of a half-disgusted, half-puzzled scarecrow, or some ancient statue he saw in art books his mother used when she was allowed to homeschool him during the summers. He makes no movement for several moments as he anxiously contemplates his next move. He stares at the girl’s eyes, partially disarming him in an otherwise hostile situation according to everything he has ever been taught.
“Relax! I’m being sarcastic,” the girl nonchalantly says as she begins to walk in a circle around the boy and peer up into the sky. The wind continues to blow.
Andrew moves his eyes as she circles him, but he does not turn his body.
“I feel like I’m talking to my great grandmother Stephania, geez, you sure can’t take a joke, can you? What’s your name anyway?” asks the girl, completing her first lap with a smile. She briefly makes eye contact through the strands of hair blowing sideways across her face.
“Andrew,” the boy says obediently.
A long pause engulfs him until she makes her way back into his vision from the left.
“And what’s your name? I will happily report you to the authorities for playing such mind games on me!”
“Oh, me?” the girl says as she smiles, still looking ahead, enjoying the forgiving breeze and warm sun on her brown face.
“I’m Queen Dayanara, chief liaison to the sun god,” she exclaims as she raises her open hands above her head, still slowly walking around the boy.
Now the boy breaks out of his paralysis.
“You’re not a royal queen, you’re just a girl. You’re too young to be a queen! If anything you’d be a princess, but I don’t think there even are any princesses in the world anymore. You’re lying!” he stomps and wags his finger as he shouts his renunciations, halting the girl in her path and nearly forcing her to step into the nearby grass.
“Oh, I’m just using my imagination is all! Haven’t you ever played with the ideas in your head before?” she answers.
“Well, yes, but those kind of things are not appropriate outside of dreaming, and you must never speak of them out loud! Even I know that, and I hardly pay any attention in school, but I certainly follow the rules because I know what’s good for me!” he says, now producing fresh drops of sweat across his forehead.
“Listen, you must be new around here. I don’t know where you’re from, but around here, we are free. I am just a kid and so are you, so do not scold me!” she says with her hand on her hips, hair still blowing in her face.
“You can think what you want, but I’m going home,” Andrew says as he begins to turn around.
“Where is your home?” she asks.
He stops and looks slightly down into the distant grass, avoiding the palatial structures that make up his horizons.
Before he can answer, she asks again, “Do you know where you are?”
“In the tropics,” he responds thoughtlessly.
“You are in the Satirical Islands,” she pronounces. “Look around you, don’t you notice anything different from back home?”
“Well yes,” he says slowly, “everything is different, like the food and the air and the-“
She cuts him off, “No, not that. Look around.”
After a moment of hesitation, he looks up and instantly begins to see things he hasn’t noticed in the five days that he’s lived here. He looks at the nearest mansion and notices a banner above the third story that reads “Homeless Shelter.” He looks at the yacht in the distance with the words “The Little Raft” painted across the side. The closest mail pod had the address scratched off and the word “Heaven” written across it.
“So you guys are allowed to joke around?” Andrew says as he continues to scour the horizon for surprises. “I don’t get it.”
“What, are you two years old?” she replies.
“No, I’m actually not even close to two years old, I’m…-“
“I’m being sarcastic, Mister Grumpypants!” she says, giggling.
“My names not… Oh,” he says, finally beginning to connect the dots. “But won’t you get in trouble?” he asks.
“My middle name is Trouble,” replies the girl, now skipping down the sidewalk.
“Wait, I can’t tell if you’re being serious. Where are you going?” he asks as he scurries along after her.
“Come with me, I have something I want to show you.”

The young couple hurries along the sidewalk for several blocks, enjoying the catch-phrases displayed on the homes of the Satirical Islands residents.
Most of the estates are surrounded by acres of short, bright green grass, with most landscaping projects displayed on the roof of the huge homes.
However, one estate the couple passes has wheat in lieu of grass, interrupting the flow of the neighborhood. The mail pod along the street at this home says “Gluten-free.”
Andrew didn’t get this joke, but they scampered along anyway.
One home was adjacent to rows and rows of olive trees that, supposedly, if viewed from above, the branches spell out “Let us make war!”
One home was surrounded by a quarter-mile long blacktop track with several lanes. Lettering on the front of the house read, “I don’t like running, I just like tracks.”
They are approaching one of the biggest estates on the island. This mansion’s yard is much larger than all the others. Rather than uninterrupted, short, green grass, this yard is speckled with décor. On the nearest half of the yard, the mansion is surrounded by a nine-hole golf course. On the other half, there are numerous fountains, brick pathways, exotic plants of all types, and other ornaments. They approach the front gate and finally have a view of the mansion in entirety. The edges of the building are gold-tipped. There is a balcony at every window that is not ground-level. There are numerous American flags waving on the estate, with all 62 stars and 13 stripes on the Star-Spangled Banner. A valet is stationed at every entrance, including the rooftop, and several butlers and gardeners are tending to the needs of the owner.
“Well, what’s so satirical about this place?” Andrew asks in the shadows of the tall gates.
The young girl tells him to look just beyond the 8th hole of the golf course, slightly left of the private prison, and adjacent to the church.
A sign reads, “I’m a Democrat.”

Andrew scurries out the front door into the humid afternoon air. The door loudly slams, already several feet behind him, cutting short his mother's audible warning to be home before dinner.

The sun is still high in the sky. The pale boy continues to jog down the cul-de-sac of the upscale neighborhood his parents recently dragged him along to. Tropical climates always bothered Andrew. He hated to sweat, hated mosquitos, and definitely hates the food of this foreign land.

See, Andrew was born in a Metroglass, one of 15 in the world, so the meaning of "outside" as we know it, is quite foreign to him. Once the Third Cold War began several years before Andrew's birth, the government authorized the construction of Metroglass "bubble-cities" under pressure from the ultra-wealthy. And so, the wealthiest families began to gobble up all the real estate in these bubble cities to use as a nuclear shelter or for a winter home. There are many benefits and drawbacks to living in a Glass, namely, their immunity to nuclear weapons, self-sufficiency, and the unfortunately bland nature of virtually everything- not to mention the strict security measures in the form of an alternate constitution and set of rights. This is why most of these families that own property in a Glass also own homes elsewhere, and frequently move in and out of a Glass to escape the monotony. The only food available, and permitted, in a Metroglass is a dense white cube called a Block. Legend has it, they are modeled off an antiquated "Icebreakers" gum product from the Great Expansion Era between the First and Second Cold Wars, but I digress.

Barely reaching the first stop sign before slowing to a walk, Andrew has to catch his breath. Although the boy hates the new world he was forced to move to, he never had a close relationship with his parents, despite being an only child. He spent much of his time alone. Calling his parents, and especially his mother, 'helicopter parents' would be an accurate description, if only helicopters still existed.

Andrew takes off his backpack and kneels to the ground. Digging through his bag, he notices a shadow in the corner of his eye and quickly looks up, still out of breath. He wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead. Still slowly rustling through his bag, he looks around and sees nothing but large, colorful homes surrounded by acres of perfectly-tended-to yards. The swaying of palm trees is the only movement on the backdrop of the cloudless sky.

Finally, he pulls out his Apparel 2S, a handheld device designed by Apple that just came out last autumn. The scrawny boy stands up and presses the button to instantaneously change into a fresh set of clothes. Before putting his backpack back on and continuing his journey to anywhere-but-here, he takes a Block from a small pocket within his bag and eats it, closing his eyes and enjoys the nostalgic feeling of home.

“Nice butt,” says a female voice.
Startled, Andrew quickly jolts and turns around to see a dark-haired girl. She is exactly his height, wearing a blouse with sharp-cornered designs on it in many shades of orange, black, white, and red. She has dark green shorts on that extend to her knees. Her blouse and the strings on the pockets of her shorts blow in the steady wind parallel to her long hair.
“Pardon?” Andrew exclaims, seemingly in a daze. He adjusts his collar and fidgets with his bag in sweaty nervousness, despite a dry set of clothes.
“I said nice butt. You mustn’t have charged your battery fully because as you changed clothes, you were naked for a moment or two.”
“What! No, there-“
“I’m joking!” said the girl. “Calm down! You look as if you’ve seen a ghost or something.”
“You can’t do that!” Andrew yells back.
“Do what?” she says, taking a miniscule step backwards.
“That’s deceit! You cannot tell me something that is not true, even if it is a joke. Have you never attended a day of school in your life?” the flustered boy fires back.
“No, I’m just a savage roaming the streets, I don’t believe in education…”

I open my eyes as soon as consciousness resumes. Great, the night is over. The sun is already horizontally shining through the loft window all the way across the second story to the couch on the back wall, where I painfully twist myself onto my feet.
Why couldn't it just be another 4am piss break that leaves you, if only for two minutes, bubbling and buzzing with a feeling of joy and a slight, involuntary smile so that it barely takes a minute to fall back asleep? despite a more frequent pumping of blood following the return trip from the bathroom..
But the day has begun. There's no way I'm falling back asleep in that bright ass fishbowl of a room. I mumble another complaint as I zip up my pants in the pitch black bathroom. I can't see even the outline of my toothbrush, let alone the sink, so I just walk out of the musty square room without sanitizing a single skin cell. I prepare my eyes for the inevitable and open the final door on my path back to my living arrangement I call my room.

The bright light and a nostalgia evoking smell simultaneously penetrate my face. To my right is a sort of balcony overlooking the living room with a two-story-high ceiling. I'd rather not talk about what is to my left in any more detail. I plow forwards, stepping between heaps of my laundry, and squat down at the top of the stairs.
A half a dozen coughs occur in the time that I complete the bows of my grayed, wet shoelaces. I live in my aunt's house, by the way, which is located a few miles beyond the suburbs in a rural district known for it's history with the KKK.

"You want a hit before you eat?" my cousin asks as I descend the steps and glance at the TV screen. I am in front of him now, at the bottom of the steps, giving serious thought to his offer.

"Nah, I'm good" I say, and he brings the bong and lighter back to his body. At this point I am across the room, bent over a glass table.

"There's some sausage on the stove" my aunt says walking into the room, nearly bumping into me as I sniff some leftover cocaine through my infected sinuses.
I proceed to walk out the front door six paces away. Nobody is outside on my street. They never are. I stroll down the driveway, querying the familiar panorama for any sign of change. The massive corn field across the road, the unique homes down the line whose yards feature numerous objects ranging from overturned barbecue grills to sticky wooden trailers filled with branches or tires.
My thoughts are simple. Fuck this place. Fuck the wind. It's 64 degrees and I only have a half mile to walk, but I'm as dissatisfied as a large bellied alcoholic at any given hour. The Shell gas station that I work at is a majority of my life if we aren't including my activities at home. I see a mere 20 customers a day until the evening where I retire to my HQ to game, websurf, masturbate, and binge-watch conspiracy theory documentaries.

Were you expecting a plot? This is my whole day. This is Rock Bottom Life. Environment around me is shit, brain activity is minimal due to its weakened state after years of mindless living that coincides with addiction to substances and a genuine IDGAF mentality.